Windswept, white tips splay forth, like piercing sunbeams, their roots merging into a medium-brown part just left of centre. A blonde wave gathers fine glossy strands upward and across, eventually disappearing from sight into a messy tuck at the back of the head. The hairline cascades, as if a curtain pulled back by ties, not once, but twice. Wispy soft tufts gather delicately before small, pinned ears ending in rounded lobes, each displaying a bright gem encircled in gold – a rare gift from her father.
An exercise in paying attention, after Anne Lamott.
National pandemic policy, effective from 23 January
Status:Strict lockdown with a curfew
• no-one is permitted to be outdoors between 21.00 and 4.30 without an official curfew exemption * • no more than 1 person aged 13 or over at your home per day * • visit no more than 1 other household per day * • work from home. Only people whose presence is essential to operational processes can go to work * • do not travel abroad and do not book trips abroad until 31 March * • masks to be worn in indoor spaces • public transport should be used for essential travel only • no more than 2 people can form a group outside the home • food and drinks establishments are closed, takeaways excepted • all retail stores, museums, zoos, cinemas, amusement parks and other public spaces are closed • no alcohol sold after 8pm
Earlier in the week I stumbled across an old personal note which triggered an everyday epiphany. The note was written in a very pragmatic Q and A format around 2018, after some years of disappointing freelance work. One question in particular caught my eye, it read What does success [in my work] look like to me?. I’d outlined five simple fundamentals:
autonomy over my work
feeling intellectually challenged
cooperative working relationships
being able to pass on knowledge through mentoring
being relatively financially comfortable
Returning to these fundamentals, so explicitly articulated, it dawned on me that I can count myself successful.
I never imagined that I would work anywhere other than small, boutique design studios, but sometimes, often, our abstract projection of success is incongruent with our granular definition of it.
National pandemic policy, effective from 15 December
Status:Strict Lockdown
• public transport should be used for essential travel only * • no more than 1 group of up to 2 visitors to your home in one day * • no more than 2 people can form a group outside the home * • all retail stores, museums, zoos, cinemas, amusement parks and other public spaces are closed * • do not travel abroad and do not book trips abroad until mid-March * • work from home, unless that is not possible • masks to be worn in indoor spaces • no alcohol sold after 8pm • food and drinks establishments are closed, takeaways excepted
Last week I was at I Heart Studios in Amsterdam to photograph a project that has been in the works since April: a series of design prototypes for the Food industry using sustainable packaging.
From the outset I was really impressed with I Heart’s professionalism. In particular, their proposal outlined responsibilities (ours and theirs) throughout the process (clarity on a platter! 🙌🏻 ). We met in person to discuss the detailed brief I’d developed, which was followed by a half-day test shoot to determine final shot list, camera positions, lighting and background colour. Curiously, their standard practice is to insert a background colour in post, rather than shoot with a paper background, as it provides control of colour reproduction and better consistency between shots. Meanwhile, my colleague MP and I shared responsibility for sourcing all of the necessary props – from vessels to fresh food to blank label sheets and rolls to representative source material.
Testing background colour options L-R: cool grey; replicating Crush; and two variations of an orange tint. Final decision was a 20% tint of the orange from our secondary palette.
Over the last few years, a number of ‘envelope’ collections have been made by Avery Dennison for the Wine and Spirits segment. The materials featured are typically premium with strong aesthetic qualities. Hence, the photography focused on design, texture and print finishing.
In approaching this shoot, I wanted the images to play a pivotal role in telling the story of the sustainable materials featured – in relation to their material composition and performance capability. For example,rMC, made from FSC-certified paper and 30% post consumer waste, was propped with shredded newspaper and office copy paper. WhilerCrush resists rupture or significant change in appearance when wet, so was sprayed to show water droplets on its surface.
National pandemic policy, in place from 17 November:
Status:Loosened Partial Lockdown
• travel as little as possible * • maximum of 3 visitors to your home in one day * • no more than 4 people can form a group outside the home * • all food and drinks establishments are closed, takeaways excepted • museums, zoos, amusement parks by staggered appointment * • work from home, unless that is not possible • masks to be worn in indoor spaces • retail stores closed by 8pm • no alcohol sold after 8pm
In her essay ‘Suffering Like Mel Gibson’, Zadie Smith more eloquently argues what I was hacking at in ‘What we’ve lost’. In short, she suggests that the acknowledgement of suffering can be seen as an act of self-care. She writes, ‘suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual’ and therefore no-one has the right to judge the severity of another’s discomfort. Extracts pieced together here as a summary.
The misery is very precisely designed, and different for each person, and if you didn’t know better you’d say the gods of comedy and tragedy had a hand in it. The single human, in the city apartment thinks: I have never known such loneliness. The married human, in the country place, with partner and children, dreams of isolation within isolation … The widower enters a second widowhood. The pensioner an early twilight. Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to ‘real suffering’…
Early on in the crisis, I read a news story concerning a young woman of only seventeen, who had killed herself three weeks into lockdown, because she couldn’t ‘go out and see her friends’. She was not a nurse, with inadequate PPE and a long commute, arriving at a ward of terrified people, bracing herself for a long day of death. But her suffering, like all suffering, was an absolute in her own mind, and applied itself to her body and mind as if uniquely shaped for her, and she could not overcome it and so she died…
…when the bad day in your week finally arrives – and it comes to all – by which I mean that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering.
Sometimes life just feels like I’m perpetually crawling the horizon, arms spanned wide shifting grains of sand from zero to one hundred miles. My inclination toward thoroughness undermines any hope of agility. Time to shed some weight and find a balance.
